Folkestone & Hythe District Council is to benefit from a successful bid for central government funding to help areas of its planning work.
Five East Kent local authorities will jointly receive £250,000 from the government’s new Planning Skills Delivery Fund.
The fund is aimed at supporting local authorities to help clear backlogs of planning applications and address skills gaps to progress important work areas.
Ashford Borough Council led a joint bid with Canterbury, Dover, Folkestone & Hythe and Thanet councils for the planning skills element of the fund.
The grant will bolster urban design capacity to help the group produce a design code. This is an important document helping shape future development in a sympathetic way, and to achieve good placemaking.
Working together on this project ensures the authorities can maximise efficiency, make best uses of resources and be more cost effective than progressing alone.
Whilst it will be a joint commission, there will be separate design codes tailored to the particular issues in each authority area, enabling them to respond to important local context.
The group awaits further details from the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and members are currently drafting a brief of work to be published shortly.